Few programs can claim a history like METCO’s.

The Metropolitan Council of Educational Opportunity is a coalition of local school districts, state government, and a non-profit organization. Joining together voluntarily. Founded by diverse parents through grass-roots organizing. With a track record of transformative impact going back decades. METCO’s success is no accident. Generations of families, staff, and advocates have fought vigilantly, educated patiently, and persevered through countless struggles to get to this moment.

Today, we owe it to them—and to the people in Boston, suburban towns, and the state of Massachusetts who stand unified in support of METCO’s daring vision—to study this legacy, and honor it with our actions. We invite you to relive the courage, creativity, and dedication of the activists in this exhibit, and to imagine a future of METCO even more extraordinary than its past.

In the 1960s, the Boston School Committee was a stubborn opponent to Black community activists. In the face of growing protest, the elected group chaired by Louise Day Hicks denied that Boston Public Schools were segregated at all. On June 14, 1963, Ruth Batson testified before the Committee as the chair of the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination. Batson and other experts shared research and examples showing stark disparities between schools attended exclusively by Black and white children. Their fourteen demands began with “a public acknowledgment of the existence of de facto school segregation in the Boston Public Schools.” The grueling seven-hour hearing failed to persuade the Committee. It was a worst-case scenario. But the NAACP, under the leadership of president Melnea Cass, had prepared for it with a bold plan.

Roxbury residents of all ages staged creative acts of civil disobedience to affect change.

In the days after the School Committee refused to discuss their demands, the NAACP and other community groups sprang into action. Demonstrators like Rev. Vernon Carter picketed and held sit-ins at the School Committee building. The following week, a much larger mobilization began: a school boycott involving 30% of Boston high school students. This Stay Out for Freedom, led by former Dartmouth roommates Noel Day and Rev. James Breeden, was more than a walkout: parents, grandparents, teachers, and church leaders put together dozens of pop-up Freedom Schools all over Roxbury, providing lessons on Black history, citizenship, non-violence, and civil rights. They mounted an even larger Freedom Stay Out in February 1964, with 10,000 Black students and 1,000 white students from Wellesley, Weston, and other suburbs. These strategies did not lead directly to change, but the relationships they forged laid the groundwork for future breakthroughs.

With Operation Exodus, Boston parents created their own pathways to better education. As lawsuits made their way through the courts, activists were not waiting for the system to change to integrate schools. Ellen Jackson and Elizabeth Johnson discovered that Boston parents could enroll their children in any city school with open seats—as long as they provided their own transportation. So they put together Operation Exodus, organizing a fleet of carpools and donated buses to transport hundreds of Black children to the well-resourced schools in Boston’s white neighborhoods. The program ran for three and a half years on grassroots funds, growing to 900 students and 25 schools, and offered summer programs, tutorials, book drives, field trips, job training, a sports league, and a student newspaper.

Roxbury’s State Representative Royal Bolling originally proposed a law enforcing school desegregation in 1963, and Governor Endicott Peabody formed a commission to study the issue. The resulting report was damning, concluding that “racial imbalance represents a serious conflict with the American creed of equal opportunity.” With support from Boston African Americans and white suburban groups, the Massachusetts Legislature passed the Racial Imbalance Act in 1965, which promised to withhold funding from school districts that were “racially imbalanced” (defined as having a student body in which white children were in the minority), and provide support for cross-district enrollment to integrate schools. This legislation created a pathway for state support of inter-district enrollment for the purpose of integration. It remains a law today.

Suburban activists reached out with an idea to cross district lines.

A range of alliances began to form between suburban organizers, white and Black, and Boston leaders. In December of 1965, Brookline’s School Committee Chair Dr. Leon Trilling, an MIT professor invited Ruth Batson to Brookline High School to consider a scheme to enroll Boston black children in open suburban seats. Batson was skeptical. But when she saw the enthusiasm from School Committee members, administrators, parents, and even students, she warmed to the idea. The two of them hit the road for the next six months alongside NAACP leaders like Paul Parks, securing commitments from six other towns: Arlington and Lexington to the north, Braintree to the south, and Lincoln and Wellesley joining Newton and Brookline on the west.

METCO, which was shorthand for the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity, came together with a small staff and hundreds of volunteers in Boston and the participating suburbs. Ruth Batson led the effort to recruit Boston students for the inaugural class. She interviewed hundreds of prospective students in her home and took families on tours of the unfamiliar towns. Meanwhile, residents and administrators in the partner districts organized support committees and recruited “host families” to help orient their new classmates.

Just as Ruth Batson became METCO’s executive director in 1968, racial tension in America escalated. Non-violent civil rights icon Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered, and the Black community in Boston and across the country faced grave doubts about the viability of integration. Under Batson’s leadership, METCO organized a student conference, teacher trainings, and a Black history curriculum to facilitate dialogue. That summer, the METCO Parents’ Council took a vote on whether to keep the program going. They were unanimous in favor. The suburbs voted with their actions—the number of METCO partners doubled again from 14 to 28. Batson left METCO in 1969, and Robert Hayden became its third director. Batson went on to lead several Boston University child psychiatric programs, revitalize the African American History Museum, and establish the Ruth M. Batson Educational Foundation and Scholarship.

A legal victory triggered a system-wide integration mandate—and a violent backlash that still haunts the city.

Twenty years after Brown vs. Board, the NAACP of Boston won its longstanding lawsuit against the Boston School Committee. The city was ordered by the U.S. District Court to desegregate its public schools. McGuire, Batson, and many other Black leaders worked to provide community input and leadership of the plans to implement the order. The system authorized by Judge Arthur Garrity required students from white and Black neighborhoods to travel to each other’s communities to attend school. Thousands of white families simply boycotted schools in the Black neighborhoods, and white mobs attacked the Black children as their buses arrived in Charlestown and South Boston. For ten years, Boston’s Black children risked verbal and physical attacks just for going to school. Once there, however, they seized the opportunities to learn and grow.

White groups like Louise Day Hicks’ ROAR and best-selling books like Anthony Lukas’ Common Ground cemented a narrative of “forced busing,” which suggests that resistance was based not on refusal to racially integrate but on the form of transportation required. This popular narrative was both misleading and emotionally charged, burying the memory of decades of activism by Black Bostonians that built toward this radical effort. Meanwhile, METCO buses continued to ride to the suburbs.

METCO is still adapting, evolving, and breaking barriers under the leadership of Milly Arbaje-Thomas.

In 2018, a new generation took the helm of METCO, Inc. with a social worker, community leader, and METCO parent Milly Arbaje-Thomas. Having immigrated from the Dominican Republic as a child, Milly knew the challenges and possibilities of a multi-cultural, multilingual world. With her operational expertise and optimistic vision, Milly worked to modernize the program for its participants and envision its role in the 21st century. Above all, she drew inspiration from METCO’s origins: parents and children, working across differences, to create the learning opportunities they need to live in a diverse society. With tens of thousands of METCO alumni reconnecting, the movement for racial integration has a bright future.

In the weeks following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, rallies and marches were organized from Brookline to Wellesley. Superintendents, METCO Directors, and School Committee members assembled in Hyde Park to make public statements of solidarity for the Black community and commit to adopting anti-racism resolutions in their districts. Many conducted assessments of equity in their schools; invested in diversity, equity, and inclusion leadership and training; and fostered dialogue with their students. METCO Headquarters, our suburban district partners, and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts may be more united than ever in our commitment to anti-racism. Together we are a model for the nation. Every day, we prepare students—Black, brown, and white—to thrive in a diversifying world and to lead it toward greater justice. That may be the ultimate goal of racial integration.